Maro Itoje is best known as captain of England’s rugby union team. But when he is not reaching to claim line-outs in the Six Nations, he is also involved in the arts. It is this second strand to his life that brings Inside Housing to interview him at a pop-up in London run by the gallery he co-founded.
The Akoje Gallery has made a name for itself championing emerging artists, and has a roster of interesting initiatives, from a project displaying artwork in British Airways’ first class lounge in Lagos, to an artist-in-residence programme at one of the King’s homes in Scotland, Dumfries House (this will not be the only royal reference in this article).
But the story of why we’re talking to the rugby star today starts in a regeneration project at the Bank of England’s former Bristol offices.
“I do think redevelopment as a principle is a good thing,” Mr Itoje tells Inside Housing. “I think when you look to develop areas, improve areas, beautify the area, I think that is a good thing.”
The offices were part of a derelict group of postwar brutalist buildings around the ruins of St Mary le Port Church near Bristol’s Castle Park. Filled out by the neighbouring former premises of Norwich Union and Lloyds, the decrepit site was the subject of years of planning rows over at least three different proposals for redevelopment.
But four years after a proposal by developers MEPC – the commercial property arm of investment firm Federated Hermes – was finally given the go-ahead, demolition work is now underway.
The scheme will see the postwar buildings torn down and replaced with new offices and street-level retail, while what is left of the church – much of which was destroyed during World War II – will be made publicly accessible.
“I did go into the building before they started knocking it down. I went into the Queen’s apartment and had a look in the bank vaults underground. Absolutely enormous, just quite unbelievable,” says Russ Leith, co-founder of a local community group called Friends of Castle Park.
“It was built like a nuclear fallout bunker. Of course, it had to be. It had an apartment for the Queen in there, which might seem a strange place to put the Queen if she’s visiting Bristol, but that was probably the most well-guarded building in the whole of the city.
“I’m sure there would have been armed guards in it, because it was full of gold. It was a bullion bank, and so massively built that it isn’t something you could just turn up with a wrecking ball and knock down.”
“When you see a space that you’re proud of, see a space that you’re invested in, see a space that you like and see value in, things like vandalism go down”
Having opposed earlier redevelopment proposals, Mr Leith is supportive of the MEPC project as it doesn’t encroach on Castle Park. But he warned MEPC early on that the hoardings around the building site would likely end up covered in graffiti “tags”.
Unlike decorating first class airport lounges, this is a problem that will be familiar to Inside Housing readers.
“Bristol is kind of the centre of the universe when it comes to graffiti and tagging, which is kind of the lowest form of graffiti,” Mr Leith says.
Even before the development began, the old, derelict buildings had been targets for graffiti for years. “Right from the outset, five years ago when I first met one of the directors from MEPC, I pointed out that we were going to have a tagging issue here when the hoardings go up around this site.”
The St Mary le Port site has a perimeter of around half a kilometre and the hoardings are roughly 2.5 metres high. That’s a lot of hoardings, and a lot of space to graffiti them.
“People were turning up with a rucksack full of cans of paint, and they were doing their tag, and they weren’t going to go home if they had paint left,” Mr Leith says. “It spread around the park, so lots of stone walls in the park got hit as well.
“There was getting on for 50 really big, quite offensive [slogans] – things like ‘fuck the police’, and all that sort of thing. Just really offensive stuff.
“And I believe that was probably the same people who were tagging the hoardings around the St Mary le Port site, just simply because they were in town, they had all this paint, they needed to do something with it.”
Bristol is a hotbed of graffiti artists, most famously Banksy, but the graffiti that covered the hoardings did not go down well. Leith says the traders at the historic St Nicholas Market, which faces the site, blamed the graffiti-covered hoardings for loss of business due to the ‘broken windows’ effect.
After around 10 months, he says, “there wasn’t a square metre of hoarding visible”.
That is when Federated Hermes approached Mr Itoje’s gallery. The investment firm had already worked with the Akoje Gallery to commission sculptures for its Silverstone Park development to meet its Section 106 requirements. Off the back of that, it asked the gallery to work on the St Mary le Port development.
“The problem was the original design and the original hoarding was getting graffitied on quite a lot,” Mr Itoje tells Inside Housing. “So they wanted to essentially beautify the place and make the community more invested and engaged in the area.”
The Akoje Gallery brought in a local artist, Lucy Oates.
“We presented designs, which they were happy with, and we essentially beautified the space,” Mr Itoje says. “And I think that’s important, because the community now sees something in that hoarding they’re proud of. And when you see a space that you’re proud of, see a space that you’re invested in, see a space that you like and see value in, things like vandalism go down.
Ms Oates’ designs incorporate elements suggested by local school students. “The students were asked, if they imagine that they’re looking out from a ship and looking at things in Bristol... what they would imagine they can see in Bristol,” says Akoje Gallery’s co-founder Khalil Akar, a former construction manager.
“One of the heavy elements was more floral designs that they ended up doing. So [Ms Oates] did incorporate those into the designs, which can be seen plastered all around the hoarding.”
And it has gone down well. “It’s all abstract art, but it’s very colourful,” Mr Leith says. “It’s kind of uplifting. It’s a massive improvement on the tags that were there, and of course [on] plain blank hoardings as well. So it’s a really good, vibrant splash of colour surrounding the site.”
“The students were asked, if they imagine that they’re looking out from a ship and looking at things in Bristol... what they would imagine they can see in Bristol”
Rather than being painted straight on, Ms Oates’ designs were printed onto aluminium, which was then attached to the hoardings, avoiding the need for road closures to paint the hoardings.
Mr Leith says the artwork has seen partial success in cutting the graffiti – on two sides the tagging has more or less stopped. He says the market traders see the new artwork as “a vast improvement”.
But on the other two sides, facing the park, the graffiti is back.
“I started off cleaning some of it myself, but it just got the better of me really, because it’s a vast area – there’s probably at least 600 square metres of hoarding completely tagged to within an inch of their lives, and it’s completely obscured Lucy’s artwork,” Mr Leith says.
Nevertheless, while the Bristol project is ongoing, the Akoje Gallery is open to similar work elsewhere – commercial developments and Section 106 obligations, public installations and internal artwork.